The Historical Roots of Indonesia’s New Order: Beyond the Colonial Comparison

Abstract

In the middle of the 1960s, Indonesian politics took an apparently profound turn. The personalised, charismatic rule of the country's first president, Sukarno, gave way to the dour, sometimes almost anonymous, administrative style of a new president, Soeharto, a general and former head of the army's strategic reserve. Indonesia's strident leftist engagement with world affairs gave way to a quiet alignment with the West. Within Indonesia, the permitted space for public politics contracted sharply: whereas shrill ideological assertion had been the motor of politics under Sukarno's Guided Democracy, the regime of Soeharto relegated explicit ideology and demonstrative politics to the margins of public life. And economic decay gave way to a sustained programme of development that raised Indonesia from the ranks of the world's poorest nations to become an incipient Asian tiger. Soeharto called his regime the New Order, and it was indeed a sharp contrast with the 'Old Order', a term which came to encompass both the Guided Democracy of Sukarno and the seven years of parliamentary democracy which preceded it. But where, if it was indeed new, did the New Order come from? Part of the answer lies, of course, in the broader global developments of the time. Indonesia was one of several repressive developmentalist regimes (Feith 1982a) in the Third World in which authoritarian leaders employed state power and the support of the United States in the name of kick-starting what was meant to be a self-sustaining development process. In this respect, Soeharto's Indonesia resembled the South Korea of Bak Jeonghui (Park Chung Hee), the Philippines of Marcos, and the Iran of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As the divergent fates of these cases suggest, however, global circumstances were not the only determining factors at work in the emergence or functioning of these regimes. To understand where they came from, we also need to look at history. But which history?